We talk a lot about replacing Windows with Linux here at XDA, and it's something I personally advocate for. I've tried a handful of Linux distros over time and prefer them in many ways to Windows 11. However, when this kind of conversation happens, it's almost always in relation to desktop PCs or laptops. There's not much talk about Linux on tablet PCs, which left me curious.

So, I had to satisfy that curiosity, and I spent the last few days attempting to replace Windows with Linux on the Minisforum V3 I reviewed some time ago. My findings? Well, Linux does some things right, but it was a bit of a hassle to find a good option.

Starting with Arch

Combined with GNOME and KDE

I wanted to start out with a more flexible distro, so my first couple of attempts were using Arch Linux. A quick search told me that GNOME or KDE desktop environments were the best for touch, and having used Ubuntu in the past, I started with GNOME.

GNOME does a lot right for touch screens, making it easy to open the workspace manager, notifications, and other UI elements. It's also supposed to have a lot of touch-based gestures for managing windows and the like, but after fiddling with these for a while, I found that they simply didn't change any behaviors on my computer. The settings are supposed to apply to both touchpads and touchscreens, but I saw no such results, and decided I'd try something else.

So, I reinstalled Arch, but this time with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, and things went a bit more smoothly, albeit still not perfectly. I like that KDE has options for swipe gestures at the edges of the screen, but unfortunately, that's all it has, and there aren't a ton of options for what those gestures can do. I also found that some of the gestures required swiping at a very specific speed or in a particular way. For example, I wanted to swipe up to open the launcher, but it seemed like I was swiping too quickly, and once I slowed down the gesture, it worked fine. Another annoying instance was the lock screen, where swiping caused the clock to fade to seemingly make way for the login screen, but only swiping in a specific direction actually accomplished that.

KDE also required some setup with installing a virtual keyboard (Maliit), and even then, I wasn't getting text suggestions while I typed. KDE is very responsive, and it's fairly easy to do things like dragging apps to the edges of windows to have them resize, but it just didn't feel polished enough. Again, I decided to try something else.

Fedora KDE Mobile

Getting better

At this point, I heard about a Linux distro I wasn't familiar with before, called Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile, an alternative version of Fedora's KDE Plasma optimized for mobile devices. It was initially designed for phones, but many of the same design principles apply to a tablet, so this seemed promising.

And indeed, KDE Mobile is much more touch-optimized experience, though it's not without its problems. Right off the bat, the UI in KDE Mobile is presented more like an Android phone. The desktop is empty and shows a small arrow that indicates you can swipe up to open the app list and start opening your apps. You can add apps to the desktop by pressing and holding on their icon, similar to how many Android phones behave.

By default, every app launches in full-screen mode, though you can enable "docked mode" to turn it into a more mouse-friendly experience with windowed apps. I prefer it this way even when using a tablet, though, especially one with a screen this large. The downside then comes from the fact that the UI isn't really optimized for touch in that sense. While KDE typically offers an option to enable touch mode with larger UI targets, this distribution gets rid of that, presumably because most UI elements are designed to work with touch from the get-go. The problem is, in docked mode, that's not the case, and the buttons for closing or minimizing an app are quite small.

There's a lot to love with this distro for a touchscreen device, though. Touch gestures make it relatively easy to switch apps by swiping up or down with three fingers, or you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to head back to the app launcher, or swipe and hold to open the task switcher. There's also a built-in touch keyboard that's very responsive and works quickly.

Alas, problems also arise here. I couldn't find options for configuring the multi-touch swipe gestures, and for the gestures that require swiping from the bottom of the screen, I still found them to be hit or miss. On multiple occasions, I had to swipe multiple times to get the actions to trigger, while other times it seemed to work completely fine. And the touch keyboard, while better, still didn't always open on the sign-in screen after a cold boot or reboot. The trick to make it work seems to be to take focus away from the password field and then clicking it again, though it's still a bit of a hassle. Additionally, despite being set up with a password containing letters and numbers, the lock screen will open a number pad by default, with no visible way to change this to default to a full keyboard.

In any of these cases, I also learned something unfortunate that isn't Linux's fault, but does hurt my experience: Vivaldi (my web browser) doesn't work well with touch screens on Linux. Text fields don't prompt the virtual keyboard to appear, and any pop-up that the browser creates is unresponsive to touch and causes the rest of the browser to not respond, either. In fact, I also eventually realized that Slack has a similar problem when it comes to typing, and it doesn't prompt the keyboard to appear. This can be kind of fixed by using button mode instead of gesture mode for navigation, which lets you have a keyboard button in the bottom right corner of the screen to summon it as needed. However, since text boxes aren't recognized, the keyboard will often cover them, so you can't see what you've typed.

A slew of other options

None of them are great

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be one single Linux distro that works particularly well for touchscreen-only devices. After these ventures I tried to go through a few more options, starting with Bazzite. I've used this distro in the past on a gaming handheld, and for that kind of device, it works very well. However, I found that it still didn't quite deliver a great touchscreen experience if you just want to use a tablet.

The KDE desktop on Bazzite does have a unique benefit with a keyboard that can be brought up at any time by swiping from the bottom of the screen, but much like distro above, that keyboard overlays any text field you select, plus it's somewhat sluggish to appear. Still, since the keyboard is easy to bring up and dismiss, this is potentially one of the better options.

I then tried the Windows-inspired AnduinOS, based on Ubuntu, but while the look and feel of the distro are very similar to Windows, it didn't inherit any of the touch features. And again, there's no support for other gestures out of the box. I tried installing an app called Touché (I actually tried this on Arch Linux with GNOME, too), which is supposed to enable some touchscreen gestures, but it's designed for the X11 window manager, and since most distros now come with the newer Wayland, it doesn't work.

Finally, I resorted to Ubuntu itself. Using GNOME as the desktop environment and being one of the most prominent Linux distros, I thought Ubuntu might offer the best experience with some proper tweaks around touchscreens.

For the most part, this turned out to be the case. GNOME does work well for touch, though there's no easy gesture for showing the app launcher, meaning you have to reach for the icon when you need it.

Otherwise, though, Ubuntu makes things relatively easy. A virtual keyboard is included and it mostly works pretty well. It appears quickly and it's fairly responsive; however, it still provides no word suggestions or corrections as you type, requiring you to be much more precise. The keyboard is also not customizable in any meaningful way in terms of its layout or size. Still, using active edges, you can easily snap apps side-by-side, touchscreen gestures make it easier to switch between apps and open quick settings or notifications, and overall touch support is solid. Some small things still sour the experience, though. In addition to the keyboard issues, swiping over the app list to switch pages works, but it requires swiping over an empty space. If you accidentally touch an app icon at the first touch, it will register as a tap and you can no longer swipe to switch to the next page.

No solution is perfect

Some of my attempts did result in usable experiences, with Ubuntu probably being the best of the bunch in terms of being relatively usable out of the box. However, none of them really justified the hassle of switching operating systems, with caveats making each option slightly less appealing than Windows 11.

For all its flaws, Windows 11 still has the best touch experiences, with touch gestures that make everything much easier, including the ability to open the Start menu, swipe to the all apps list, open the notification, and so on. Multi-finger gestures aren't customizable, either, but for the most part, all the essential features work well out of the box, as I illustrated in a guide I wrote a couple of years ago. Plus, these gestures are generally more responsive, snapping apps side-by-side offers more configurations thanks to Snap Assist, the keyboard offers word suggestions and is much more configurable, and it's just easier to use. All of these capabilities are there from the start with Windows, and they're easily visible in the UI. I could have tried to get some of these capabilities back in Linux, but it quickly proved a point that Windows is just better, no questions asked. Hopefully, some developments around touch screens will come to Linux in the future.